Religious Studies

The history evidences: the Local Churches that were historically associated with earthly empires were uninterested in the canonical establishment of local churches under their jurisdictions, and therefore usually granted autocephaly to churches only under the pressure of historic circumstances. No exception is the Moscow Patriarchate, which has incorporated the Orthodox Church in Ukraine since 1686.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Ukrainian society suffer from division. The majority of Ukrainian Orthodox believers belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate. The rest of the Orthodox community of Ukraine has chosen a different path of self-proclaimed autocephaly. However, neither the first nor the second path is optimal for the Orthodox Church in Ukraine to date.

Head of Roman Catholics in Ukraine Publishes Appeal on 80th Anniversary of Holodomor

On November 18 the head of the Conference of Bishops of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki of Lviv published an appeal on the 80th anniversary of the Holodomor calling on the faithful to pray for those who died tragically.

“In commemorating the victims of this terrible genocide, let us pray for all who have died from starvation. Let us ask the Almighty Lord that they have received the heavenly repast from which they will not feel any scarcity, and so their greatest happiness will be to be satisfied by the beauty of the Face of God,” the archbishop said in his letter, which was published by the Catholic magazine Credo.

The archbishop urged to be careful when eating and especially with bread. According to him, we should “not forget about sharing food with the poor, taking care of inward purity.”